week 3 some thoughts after studying BI development cases

We have examined a few case studies of the development of business intelligence systems in week 3. Unlike any subjects in science which usually have refined theories, it can be concluded from the case studies that there is no ultimate approach to develop a BI system. Different firms use different methods to develop BI, including in – house development, outsourcing, adaptive development and many others which are not popular at the moment. The rationale behind companies’ choices is very complex and some companies even don’t have good reasons why they choose one approach rather than the other. As a student, I have been looking at all sorts of BI system development and hoping that I can extract some BI system development principles or rules from real cases to guide future practise. There are many similarities among technical details, but when I take social, cultural, people and external environment into consideration, it is extremely difficult to figure out what lead us to the successful BI development. Social paradigm suggests that we should look at a problem from different perspectives and try to understand each of them to improve overall understanding of the situation. But human brain can process limited amount of information at any given time. When I look at a case study from different angles, I don’t feel my understanding of the problem has significantly improved. Sometimes, it is even counterproductive that I feel the case is too complicated. We are living in an information age where information is at our fingertips. But how should we process and organize the information in an appropriate way so that we can process them in human brain? In the lecture, we have looked at case studies one by one. It seems that we have learned success and failures from each of them. But I want to know the connections between them so we can build knowledge to help us deal with a wider range of BI system development. In other words, knowledge specific to one company’s BI system does not have great value to other BI systems. I hope I can have more insight into the connections among a variety of BI systems at the end of the semester.